Diabolitin

So far, I've had two systems probed by the Diabolitin; one of them from two different sites. I know that, because that one has two batches of eighteen ships incoming, while the other just had the one.

I'm not quite sure what happened, but the first attack evaporated - I assume it was made up of Placebos, though there were no messages about it. That's one of the things I find the most frustrating, I think; when there's no information provided when something happens. You'll see the same thing when a spy ship lands - you'll see it incoming, but no message when it lands.

So I have 36 ships incoming to one world. I'm trying to upgrade the world they're coming towards before they get here, in case this lot actually do something, but there's really not much I can do. If the Diabolitin are as high level as advertised, there's not really much I can do to defend myself - all I've done is shift most of my high level spies onto the world, and am hoping I can capture any that arrive, for future experiments in the Genetics Lab I hope to be building in the next few days.

In the meantime, I'm working on upgrading my new capitol - I'll be getting my first level 16 resource producing building in the next day, which is very exciting. I've opted to upgrade the Recylcing facilities, which will give me a recycling rate of around 100,000 per hour. Which is very nice. I'm also working on upgrading the University on that world, to take over as the main University. I'm thinking I might be spending more Essentia to get it finished faster....

Darn it

A few days of intensive work on getting a second University up to 17, and I'm wondering if I did the right thing....

The plan was quite simple; I've got one world designated as a waste world - it's got the highest capacity for waste storage of any of my worlds, together with three of each of the waste recyclers. At its peak, it was recycling over 40k per hour.

The idea was that dropping the University on the same planet would mean that I'd have the capacity to support it - there's nothing especially draining there, so most of the resource production can go straight into supporting the university.

The practice, though.... With a good chunk of the recyclers at level 15 and most of the rest not too far behind, they're producing a lot less than I'd expect. I might be able to get a couple of extra levels of University, but I can foresee myself running out of resources a lot sooner than I'd like.

Darn.

So I'm now looking at migrating it again to the world I'm now building my Capitol on. That way, I'll be able to build up the resource production facilities past 15, which will help no end in supporting the University. And I can then remove the spare university on Wasteworld, and return it to its original purpose of storing and recycling Waste.

Time to start burning Essentia again.

A brief update

I seem to have ground to a halt with progress. I've spent a couple of days shifting resources from all my more established colonies to the site of my new University. It's currently level 16, though I may need to ship in (yet more) resources to upgrade storage before I can start on upgrading to 17; which will involve another whole batch of imports before I can start there.

I suspect I should spend a few cycles in getting the local production facilities up to speed - they're averaging around 10k each, and it's not quite at the stage yet where I can't upgrade the University because I can't support the additional costs.

I think my next step might be to pump out a few of the exciting new cargo carriers to replace my existing Cargo Ships - I've got a level 16 Trade Ministry, which means that the Galleon is doable; that should give me about triple the cargo capacity; which in turns means that I can upgrade both the University and the Shipyard world quicker.

Go me.

Moving University site

So I've decided I'm going to move the University from Homeworld - I've already had to make a few tricky decisions about what to demolish on Homeworld to give me room to expand properly there, and as things stand, a high-level university is taking up quite a large chunk of resources which I can probably use better elsewhere.

I can probably shift the ship-building facilities elsewhere, too; at the moment, the only reason I've not done it yet is that Homeworld has a high level Archeology Ministry, which means I can build Excavators there. I'll take care of that once I've built up the Archeology Ministry on my ship building world.

So after a couple of hours of work, I've built the new University up to level 13. Just a couple more levels to go before I can make the move. It's going to get a little tricky, though - I need to up the amount of storage available before I've got the capacity to make the upgrades. I suspect I might start using Essentia to help out with the build times; but I'm going to be importing a vast amount of resources over the next few days, I think.

Memo to self: when pushing resources, do try to remember where you're sending the stuff too, hmm?

Spies and the Saben

Well, I've given up on getting anything out of the Saben through spies. Sixteen of my spies, all trained to a decent level, and not one of them managed an actual result - most of them succeeded in getting themselves knocked unconscious, and two have gotten themselves captured.

So I can't see any point in keeping the rest there - I've had half a dozen attempts, and the best result I've managed is that my spies didn't get knocked out. So a couple of ships are on their way to ship out the first half; I'm going to send more ships as and when and hopefully pull the rest out. Getting the two captured spies out will have to wait til they've been released from jail.

Or I could just move the schedule forward, and send in as much waste as I can get together. I've got a couple of million units on my homeworld, and am shipping Scows there slowly; and my waste re-processing world is has around three million units, and they'll be getting the next batch of Scows once I've built the Spaceport up enough to the point where I can have more than a two ships waiting.

So the next step involves sending around a million units of waste in their direction, and see what the Saben do next. The one downside is that I'll be sending the Scows from two different planets, with a preceding wave of Scanners from a third, which means I'll need to work the timings out carefully beforehand. Stupid maths.

More Saben!

So my spying offensive against the Saben has been slightly less impressive than I'd've liked. Specifically, I have 16 spies on the local planet, and have given them all the Gather Empire Intelligence mission, the easiest one.

Results have been, shall we say, unimpressive?

None of them actually managed to succeed. That's quite definitely not good. I'm assuming that this somewhat disturbing lack of success is due to a large amount of trained Saben spies on the planet. Which by itself is quite impressive, considering that the colony's not been there for a week yet; methinks that the building rules are different for Saben.

So I could try and send a few more spies - I've got the ships, and the spies are already there - but that might just prove to be even more disheartening. I should probably update my spying buildings, too, because that'll never hurt. Though there are so many things I'd like to be building right now - I think my longest build queue is four days right now.

Additionally, I've just discovered a second Saben colony, to the north of the one I already knew about. Now, where did I leave those two million units of waste?

The Saben are back....

And while I'm in the writing mood....

With the new resurgence of the Saben, I've gained a colony just a short hop from most of mine - it's in the next system over.

This is probably not good.

I've tried a quick spying mission, but it looks like the spies already there are much too good for my lot; of the first batch of four, two failed their missions, and the other two were knocked unconscious. True, I could deluge it with spies from every planet I've got - actually, now that I think about it, that's actually quite tempting - but I was really hoping that level 13 spies would have been able to cope moderately well by themselves.

Also, annoyingly, this colony is also not in Orbit 3. Which means I can introduce them to Mr Garbage Scow again, and then prove unable to benefit from removing them. Harumpf.

I've also dispatched two Shuttle loads of spies on a long range reconnaissance mission which they won't even reach for another couple of days. I suspect I'll send a shuttle for them as soon as they're landed, but that means that they'll essentially be out of use for five days. The question is, given that these are the only spies I've got with actual experience, would it be better to burn them and re-train new ones, losing the precious experience that I've managed to build up? Though not, I don't think, enough to actually make a difference... It'll cost me resources - see previous comments about how I'm over-producing - but save me time.

Ah, decisions, decisions.

Excavators, revisited

I've now been mass-producing these for a couple of weeks; by my count, I've sent out around a hundred.

Are they worth it? I'd have to say, probably not really.

It looks like my initial successes - a couple of Glyphs and a Building Plan from the first batch of six - were pretty atypical. I'd say about half of the ships I send out don't find anything, and of the ones that do, it's mainly resources. I've had maybe a half dozen Glyphs, and one additional plan.

The resources seem to be in the region of 2,000 either Ore or Food - I assume that Water and Energy are possible, but I've yet to find any - which means that they don't come close to paying for the cost of the Excavator.

But I think I shall continue to send them out. The possibility of finding Plans is good, and since I'm already running a huge resource surplus and don't have anything else to do with the Shipyard - well, why not?

How to... creating your first colony

So, you've been playing for a couple of days, and have gotten to the point where you're ready to send out your first Short Range Colony ship. There are a few things you need to bear in mind before you start colonizing the Expanse.

Actually, I should put down what I did in my first few days; and then advise you to do completely the opposite... I'm fairly sure that there are any number of things I could have done better.

Don't just send your colony ship out to the first system you find. It's worth sending out as many probes as you can beforehand to find something suitable first, though with the increasing number of players, real estate is getting increasingly hard to find. So it's now you should consider whether you chose wisely in the beginning - I for one am limited to Orbit 3 planets, which means I've already lost the ability to colonise 85% of the planets out there. Oooops.

Consider what you want from a colony before you start. Is it somewhere to increase your output of resources? Somewhere to dump all your waste? In which case, think about the requirements of the buildings involved before you set out. You'll definitely want to include some of the waste recycling buildings, so make sure that any planet you're colonizing has Halite or Sulphur reserves - it's possible to get around that by shipping in resources, but do you really want to be shipping in resources every time you want to upgrade?

Check the resources available on a planet before heading out. There are twenty different types of ore in the game; planets are rated in how much of each resource they have, from 1 (a neglible amount) to lots - the highest I've seen is 8500. The non-negligible resources add up to around 10,000, I think, so if a planet has a high rating in one resource, it'll be lacking in others. You'll want a planet that has lots of various kinds of resources in lower amounts.

When your colony is established, you'll want to have a Dory on hand and ready to go when it lands. You get a small amount of resource generation from your new colony, but your Planetary Command Center won't generate much.

Happiness will be an important issue early on. Your PCC generates some food - Algae and Fungus - so getting some extra kinds of food in production will help no end; it's worth remembering that if you've got at least four kinds of food in storage, then when you issue a build order, you'll get as much Happiness as you spend in food. This is a very quick way to get your Happiness up quickly - remember, it's food in storage that counts, not necessarily food that's being produced locally, so if you've got a couple of different kinds of food on your supply Dory, then you can start benefitting from this straight way.

I'd advise setting up basic Waste recycling buildings early - certainly the Waste Sequestration Well will stop Waste becoming pollution and therefore lowering your Happiness; and the Waste Treatment Center is probably more worthwhile - it will let you pick and choose your recycling, so you can get that quick hit of the resource you really need right now.

Once you've got Waste covered, you should probably put together some Level 1 resource producing and storage buildings. The Development Ministry is a must, as it will let you start queuing buildings - the higher the level, the more buildings you can queue.

Concentrate more on upgrading the storage buildings rather than the production ones. Remember, you can resupply via Dory rather than waiting for the buildings locally to produce what you need, and it'll be a good long time before your storage buildings are large enough that you can't refill everything with the cargo from a Dory. By then, you should have built your production buildings up to the point where they can keep on top of your resource requirements.

So that's it - how to create your first colony. I hope it's of some use to you!

www.LacunaExpanse.com - come, join us!

Excavators

Well, the first five Excavators have been built and sent off.

They're taking three hours apiece to build, which means I can build 8 per day - definitely time to crank up the Shipyard a little, too.

As to the spoils - to date, I've had one that didn't find a thing; two that found resources (quite what a couple of thousand units of wheat was doing on an uninhabited planet escapes me); plus one Glyph and a Plan.

The good news is that the Plan is for a level 1 Pantheon of Hagness, which gives an extra building slot on a planet. The bad news is that it seems you can only have one per planet, and since my homeworld already has one, I can't use it there - none of the other worlds are out of room yet. So I have a Plan I can't do much with at the moment.

Anyone want it? Feel free to make an offer... Otherwise, I'll just have to see whether one of my colonies can make use of it.

Subspace Supply Depot

Thanks to the building queue, my Subspace Supply Depot finally got finished this morning - that would put it at about five days after it was added to the queue.

Ow.

It was after it was built that I discovered that the 'Complete Build Queue' option only worked if the build queue was less than five days; any more than that, and you get a message saying that the queue is too long, and nothing happens. I'd been expecting it to simply expedite five days off the building queue and then disappear, and there was about a week's worth of building in there already. Bugger.

So it was time to use some precious, precious Essentia to finish the queue, and then start adding extra bits and completing those instead.

So I do now have a level 15 Archeology Ministry, and can finally start building Excavators; and shall fire off a couple of those just to see what happens. More through luck than planning, that Archeology Ministry is on my homeworld, which is currently generating resources faster than I can spend them.

So super glyph buildings, here I come!

On spies and the Saben Demesne

So, the Saben Demesne established a colony a couple of systems over from me. In fact, there were two, but I fixated on the closest one, as they were the most imminent threat.

One of my colonies started to get probed. The Saben would send a wave of scanners followed up by other things - Scows, Snarks and Scanners, with the odd Spy Shuttle mixed in, hence the earlier post about spies. I built enough drones to fight off the attacks - well, aside from the spies, as it looks like they're impossible to stop.

And I took my revenge on the nearby colony. I gifted them a large amount of waste, somewhere upwards of a million units, I think. And the next time I checked in, the planet was unoccupied. Woo-hoo.

(And on a related note, it looks like the attacks were originating from the other Saben colony; someone else managed to bag that before I could)

And now, someone's moved in to the Saben colony I encouraged to relocate. It's in the wrong orbit for me to occupy it, so someone else has moved in and is now doubtless taking advantage of the Glyph buildings abandoned when the Saben left.

So; would it be wrong of me to infiltrate spies onto their colony to steal the plans for the glyph buildings? I assume that since it's a very new colony, there won't be much in the way of serious opposition if I do....

Memo to self

When doing your daily check in, you should add buildings to the building queue before noting that the level of waste on the world that recycles 25,000 an hour is low.

That way, you'll avoid sending 250,000 units of waste to a world where you've just filled the waste storage to the brim from new building projects.

Oooops.

Starports and Cargo Ships

After a couple of weeks, the colony I've decided to dedicate as a starship factory has come online - that is, the Trade Ministry has reached the same level as the one on my homeworld.

I'm intending on increasing the level of the Trade Ministry, too - I managed to get a Freighter with a cargo capacity of 250,000 from one of the missions, and boy, do I ever want more of those. I've also got a Propulsion Lab and a Pilot Training Facility on the same world, as well as a Crashed Alien Spaceship, so the ships I'm producing there are almost twice as fast as the ones on Homeworld, and have considerably more stealth and a touch more cargo capacity.

So the plan for there now is to increase the storage facilities quickly, while also increasing the resource producing buildings. I'm happy to feed resources from other colonies by transporting them there, but I need to build up the resources produced on planet to support the rest of the infrastructure.

In the meantime, I'm replacing all my old Cargo Ships (and even a couple of Dories) with the new ones over the course of the next couple of days. And the, of course, I'll be faced with the same problem of what to do with a vast over-production of resources....

Spies, and dealing with them

(Two posts in one day. I'm in the zone)

So I notice that on one world, the Saben Demesne - I assume - have dispatched about a dozen level 13 spies. I've got enough spies of my own to stop them being able to do anything, but it looks like both sides are similar enough in level that we're pretty much cancelling each other out. Is there a way to actually get rid of them? The only one I can think of involves upping the level of the Intelligence Ministry / Security Ministry / Espionage Ministry, but for the reasons mentioned in the last post, that's liable to take the best part of a week before it'll actually happen....

Where next?

I must say, it's quite exciting - this would be my second blog post, instantly making this blog larger than about three quarters of the other blogs on the web.

So. I've been playing Lacuna Expanse for around a month now. I have a total of six planets, plus the resources - thanks to the recent Thanksgiving Happiness Boost - to start a seventh. I'm wondering, though, where I should be going....

Thanks to the ever increasing time to upgrade things, I've got a build queue of over a day on each and every colony I've got - my first world currently has enough upgrades in the queue to keep it building for almost a week, though that's thanks to upgrades to both the Archeology Ministry and the University, both for three days.

Which means that I'm building up a huge resource backlog. My homeworld is currently generating about 50k of each resource per hour, and I literally can't use it fast enough. I'm supporting the newer colonies with ships full of resources regularly, and I'm still accumulating resources faster than I can spend it.

So. What should I be doing? Should I start building Munitions Labs and extra Space Ports to build Snarks for the war that will doubtless be coming? Trading large quantities of resources? Your suggestions, please, in the comments!

A Formal Apology to the Culture

I must say, it's terribly exciting for us to be here. Up until just a couple of years ago, we'd no idea about this whole 'space' thing; we'd expanded to cover just about the whole of our planet - quite easy to do when you're little more than a ball of protoplasm that can digest anything - and thought we were rulers of the whole universe.

We knew about 'distance', of course, but when you communicate using long-chain peptide molcules passed through the air, contact, or ingestion, then distance really doesn't seem to be a function of dilution. So it came as something of a surprise to us when the Culture Ambassador landed in his shiny new spaceship, and introduced himself to us.

We say 'introduced'; he did make sterling efforts to communicate with us, but sadly for him, we'd never seen the point of evolving organs that could detect sound or light, so he didn't really have much chance of actually talking to us. And really, it's not our fault that aside from us, the only animals moving on our planet are edible. So it was a foregone conclusion that we would, in fact, end up eating him.

We acknowledge now that this was the wrong thing to do, and that eating other sentients is very poor form. Would it be any consolation for his widow to know that he was delicious?

But once we got over the initial shock that there were other things in the universe than us, we got stuck straight on into this evolution lark; we've figured out how to speak to things that aren't us in ways that don't involve the careful creation of specific molecules, and learned your language; we're even careful to refer to ourselves in the plural, as apparently some of you find the idea of a single creature dominating the landmass of four entire planets a little disconcerting.

So, our fellow sentients, we apologise for digesting your ambassador, and promise that it's unlikely to happen again; and we look forward to working with you as a useful and productive member of your alliance!

(A piece of in-character - er, in-race - prose for the Lacuna Expanse real time strategy game)